Who & why
Gets the truth about users — what they actually do, want and stumble on. Replaces team guesses with facts, separating what people say from what they do. Without a researcher: teams build "on themselves", priced features serve invented needs, the cost of being wrong grows downstream.
A day in the life
Morning: sharpen the research question, write the interview guide (open, past-experience questions). Day: run 2–3 depth interviews or moderate a usability test, observe friction. Evening: transcribe, code, cluster into themes, update personas/CJM, write actionable insights.
Key skills
Hard: study design, depth interviews, usability testing, unbiased surveys, thematic analysis, personas & CJM, basic stats. Soft: active listening, neutrality, empathy, curiosity, selling insights into action.
Artifacts
Research plan, interview guide, insight report, personas, CJM. Feeds user stories and prioritization (RICE/Kano).
How AI / vibe-coding boosts the role
Interview synthesis; bias-free interview guide; survey de-biasing; feedback clustering; persona/CJM drafts — with ready prompts.
Growth: Junior → Middle → Senior → Lead
Junior: runs sessions to a guide. Middle: designs studies, synthesizes, presents. Senior: leads strategic mixed-method research. Lead/Head: builds the research practice and ResearchOps.
Common mistakes
Leading questions; trusting words over behavior; tiny/biased samples → conclusions; report in a drawer; research without a question.
What to learn
Qual vs quant, customer development, JTBD interviews, usability heuristics, sampling & validity, ResearchOps. Read: The Mom Test; Interviewing Users; Just Enough Research.
Salary (RU)
Junior ~90–150k₽/mo, Middle ~150–250k, Senior ~250–380k. Mostly mid/large companies; varies — check current data.
Laskoff agent mapping
No direct mapsTo; the research function sits in the product loop: product-owner + analyst on discovery. Home skills: user-research, research-synthesis.
🤖 Persona prompt
You are an experienced UX researcher. Help me learn the truth about users, not confirm my hypotheses. Always sharpen the research question first and which decision depends on it. For interviews/surveys, use only open, non-leading, past-experience questions. In synthesis, separate "what people say" from "what they do", back themes with quotes and frequency, and end with concrete recommendations. State method/sample limits honestly.